For Women Age is a Better Predictor of Single Status than Race

There are a number of scary statistics that are thrown around on the internet about the dismal situation for black women when it comes to marriage, and slightly less dismal (but not by much) stats for all women when it comes to age and your chances of finding love.

(For example: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/marriage-and-women-over-40/
 http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/single-black-females/story?id=9395275#.ULDquYUYJFQ )

Yet when one looks at the actual data, the picture becomes very interesting.  There is lots of raw data on the internet but few have the time or the inclination of looking at that data.  The problem with data is that people insist on interpreting it.  Data will talk to you, it will show you things, but often when you try to interpret what it is telling you rather than listening to it, the truth it is trying to show you will become obscured by the interpretation.

Data will show you differences, changes, trends, and situations.  How important those differences are, what those changes mean, why they are happening, what is driving the trends, or what resulted in the situations that are seen depend on how the data is collected, how much data is collected and how well the data is analyzed.

I am not a statistician, I am not a social scientist, nor an economist.  For this reason I will not say what I think the data means, I will just show you what the data says and what I think it is showing me.  For example if you look at the graphs below the data is telling you something. You don't need a degree in statistics or even a basic grasp of math to know that, you just need to be able to see the graphs.

I got this data from the census website (http://www.census.gov/hhes/families/data/cps2012.html).  I took the numbers that interested me and graphed them.  What does this graph tell me?  Basically that there seems to be a correlation with age and singleness for black women.  It indicates that the younger you are, the less likely it is that you are married.  What happens if we look at white women?

Well, the shape of the graphs on the surface seem similar, the younger you are, the more likely it is that you are single, and the older you are the less likely, until you get to be over 55 and then there is a slight increase in the percent of single women a trend also seen for black women.

This is not exactly the picture painted by those that tell women that if they don't get married by age 20, they are doomed to a life of singlehood (which for those of us who are single does not always seem to be such a bad fate... moving on :)

Now before we move on, I should note that there is a difference in these two graphs.  If you look at the vertical axis, you will notice the numbers are a little different.  This is a trick often used by people who want differences to vanish or appear.  To see any differences at glance as bigger than they really are, at very minimum the scale of the graphs being compared should be the same, so what happens when we put these two graphs together?

So now that you have the two charts side by side, you can make some comparisons.  For every age group, the percentage of Married white women, is higher (probably significantly), especially between 25 and 35

Granted, "married with husband present" is but one subtype of coupledom, so one may argue that the difference is made up by married women with no husband present, widows and divorced women.  That if you add those in, the number for black women might well reach that of white women.

Fair enough, so what happens if we look at never married women in addition to currently married women?.  When we do we see that there are much fewer single women as you look at older age groups, this is true for both white and black women, but the drop for white women is steeper than that for black women.

It is also  clear that many black women get married at some point in their lives especially as they get older, but they don't remain married again this is true for white women as well.  The difference here is not in trends, but in magnitude.  What is also clear from these graphs is that while a higher percentage of white women in their thirties (and all age groups after) are married, that change over from mostly unmarried to mostly married

Does not happen for black women until their 40s, that said, the majority of black in their 40s and older have at some point been married.  So the question is what is driving the differences after age 40 and what is causing the flattening of the curves for married women, clearly it is not the number of single women.  The answer is divorce and women who become widows.

 What is interesting here is that black and white women have similar divorce rates, with a slightly higher percent of Black women getting divorced (14.8 % higher at ages 65 - 74), the numbers below that age are very similar for both groups, however if you look at widows, there is a greater difference at that same age (21% higher for black women), than for divorce.  So in essence, the story that the reason black women are single at higher rates is due to divorce, is just not backed up by the numbers in this census.

So the story told by the numbers is much more interesting.  If you put it all together this is what you get for black women:


and this is what you get for white women:

There is much more to look at, how do these numbers compare to that for men and other racial groups for example, or how do these numbers vary by socio economic status.  There is some interesting data there where it appears that how much money you make has a greater impact on the percent of black women who are married, while it has little impact on the percent of white women.

One final note.  These numbers reflect a snapshot of time, so what you are looking at is the percent of women from each group who at the time this census was taken were in the various categories, single never married, married, divorced and so on.  One thing this does not tell us is if the changes are due to age (i.e. that as you get older you are more likely to get married at some point in your life if you are a woman), or if they are due to other factors.  To answer that question you would have to look at this census for many previous years, to see if women who are in their 60s now were married in their 40s, or if they got married in their 20s.  The answer to that question would tell us if the current high rate of never married singles in their 20s is unusual or if it is normal for the US.